Distribution Automatique

Saturday, November 19

M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online 25th Anniversary Issue"Our 25th anniversary comes at an unusual moment following upon a series of traumatic political events and a decade of war. It is a moment of global economic crisis, failure of capitalism and of progressive political movements, a moment of political impasse, and of generational shift. Methods of communication have changed since we began our project 25 years ago and concepts of privacy and individuality seem to be in a process of radical transformation. We began planning this issue in the way we had planned other forums in the past: we discussed and tried to formulate our specific personal concerns and our sense of general contemporary concerns into questions and themes that we would invite a spectrum of artists to respond to. Our mutual and separate lines of thought and feeling merged into two themes:

Theme 1 How do public traumas like 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise in income inequality in the U.S., and the current recession affect, or frame, the production of your art works and art criticism? What is the role of individual style or idiosyncrasy in these times and circumstances? What is the role of the art market/fashion/art history versus such public or individual/idiosyncratic motivations and frames?

Theme 2 How do artistic intuition, creativity, community, production, and distribution function for you in the age of digital corporate conglomerates and the web 2.0? What is the nature of privacy for the artist or critic working in the age of social networking and global spectacle?"[from the introduction by Susan Bee and Mira Schor, editors]